Growing Bigger Than Our Britches

Trey Smith

What is wrong with America?

Big question.

Simple answer.

We Americans have completely lost any sense of why a country, a society, and a government exist.

Politicians, lobbyists and corporate media talking heads, and far too many ordinary people, have accepted and are promoting as gospel the circular notion that it’s important to encourage business to grow so that people will be hired and the economy can grow. This specious argument is used to justify the weakening labor unions, the raising of taxes on workers while they are cut for companies and the rich, the cutting of earned benefit programs like Social Security and Medicare, the gutting worker safety and environmental safety regulations, and the elimination of regulation of activities like banking, corporate mergers and takeovers, pharmaceutical companies etc. In fact every government action that results in making life harder or more dangerous for ordinary working people or for the poor is defended on the basis that it is necessary so that business can make more profit and help the economy to grow.

Growing the economy, however, is not, or certainly should not, be the reason we have government, the reason we are a country, or the reason we are a society.

The Constitution had it right when the country was founded. It’s about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Period.

And growth today poses a direct threat to all three of those stated goals.

Growth in all its aspects -- economic growth, growth in profits, growth in sales, growth of population, growth in income - is a threat to life. It has become clear that the imperative of ever more growth, the ethos and driving force of modern corporate capitalism, is leading to the destruction of the very biosphere that sustains life on this planet. It is a threat to liberty, too, because one country’s growth -- America’s -- requires the constant assault on those weaker countries that threaten us.

~ from Growth Is the Enemy of Humankind by Dave Lindorff ~

Since an early age, we Americans have been told that bigger or more is better. If you have x amount, you can't be a somebody unless you have xx or more. Driving a small car doesn't project the right image. If you want others to take you seriously, you need to be seen driving around town in your tank. Small houses are for the underclass. If you seek to be an "important" person, you must live in a palatial estate.

On one level or another, most of us have bought into this warped idea. Who can blame us? It's been drummed into our heads for so long. We never stop to think that bigger and more leads to most of the stress and tension in our lives. We never stop to think that this persistent striving for more is what is killing us, both physically and emotionally.

While none of us can single-handedly change the whole of society, we do have the power to change ourselves. We simply can decide that bigger and more is not what our lives are about. In time, if enough people come to this realization, it can change the trajectory of society itself.

But that shouldn't be our goal. We should simplify because it is the right thing to do for ourselves and Mother Earth. Maybe we don't have the power to make this a better world writ large, but we DO have the power to make the world within us better. We do have a mechanism to lessen our own stress and tension.

The choice is ours.